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09-16-02, for Urfé
Getting Toasted
There's a jacket on the floor. A lovely red jacket on the floor next to a chair. With delicate fingers, the birthday nymph takes the jacket from the floor and dusts it off before slipping it over her shoulders, covering her wings and buttoning it up. The jacket hangs to her ankles, but this is a good thing. They're lovely ankles, and the hem nicely frames them. The patrons eyes are immediately drawn to the delicate turn of her calf, and more than one person's thoughts are brought to an understanding of the Victorian thrill at seeing a hint of ankle beneath a lace-trimmed shirt. As she stands on the chair to see above the crowd, she reaches under the jacket, fiddles with the buttons on her Nymph dress, and lets it fall to the seat of the chair. She swishes it off the chair and into the lap of a patron before continuing.
The patrons can see her fingertips stroking the lapel, teasing the collar open just enough to expose the peaches-and-cream skin around her throat.
Shaking her head slightly, apparently lost in reverie, she begins to talk. Perhaps to herself, but loud enough to be overheard by anyone paying attention (which may explain why she dropped the dress when she put the jacket on).
“Birthdays are odd things, are they not? We add candles to a cake, we sing silly songs, we give presents to this person, why? To celebrate something that he had absolutely no control over. This person, this birthday boy, this guest of honor, inflicted great pain upon the person who loved him most. He entered this world most likely screaming, red faced and icky, and we reward him with an ice cream cake and a pointed paper hat.
“Which makes one wonder. At what point did these hats seem to someone to be a good idea? You're given brightly colored cardboard with an annoying rubber chin strap and told that it's an honor to be wearing it. It's 'fun.' No, really. The strap leaves a groove in your throat and the hat leaves you with bad hair for the day, and there's absolutely no way that you can help but look like an idiot in it. For goodness sakes, it's essentially a scaled-down dunce cap. Yet children beg to wear them. As adults you would think that we'd be here to protect our children from looking like dunderheads, but we buy the hats, then we gleefully strap them to the misinformed, naïve heads of the children in our charge 3;.but I digress.
“Essentially we're honoring this person for not dying. We're saying to him, 'yippee! You avoided standing under falling pianos. You ate your oatmeal and your fettuccini Alfredo, and you remembered to breathe on a regular basis. Good for you.
“So here we have a birthday boy. I'll not ask, nor will I announce, his age because I've become painfully aware lately that some people are overly sensitive about such matters. As if, once a person becomes an adult, age should really matter.
“I have a friend who celebrated a birthday last week. She turned 28, and she refused to tell anyone how old she was. I couldn't understand it. 'But why not? You're 28, not 128. What in the world is wrong with 28?'
“'You don't understand, Nymph. When a person is in her 20s, whether she's 21 or 29, she's In Her Twenties, and therefore she knows nothing at all of Importance. But the moment she turns 30, suddenly she's credited with being Adult. Grown Up. Despite all of her accomplishments of the past decade - college, career, family, children, fiscal responsibility - she is not Thirty, and therefore Someone To Be Reckoned With.'
“And you would think, dear Patrons, that I as the Birthday Nymph would know better. But what did I do? I took my friend out for Birthday drinks. And I mistakenly told her 'Happy Birthday' in the presence of the waiter - a young whippersnapper himself. Mere moments later our table was surrounded by young people in half-aprons and matching shirts clapping and smiling inanely.
“I looked at her from across the table. 'I'm so sorry,' I managed to whisper before the cheerful chorus began.
“Why is it that when you least want a waiter around, you're suddenly surrounded by 12 of them? Yet when you've just had a piece of crusty garlic bread scrape the inside of your throat and you're completely without a fresh glass of water and you've already consumed all of the beverages at your table in a desperate attempt to wash the crust down because it's starting to block your airway, there's not a waitstaff member or busboy to be found? Are they, perhaps, in the back practicing their inane smiles and rhythmic clapping and oh-so-cute birthday songs?
“But I digress.”
The Nymph pauses and reaches into the jacket pocket, pulling out a lovely silver flask. With a quick motion, she opens the flask and brings it to her lips. Coughing and sputtering, she passes the flask to a patron. “Careful. It's not nearly as smooth as you would think.”
“Which reminds me. Why, exactly, does one drink something that burns the throat, causes instant headache, and sends the drinker into uncontrollable coughing fits which are hideous for the complexion? I can understand desperation. In earlier, less civilized times. Cold days. Hard days of mining and prospecting, perhaps a bit of fire in the belly was a good thing. But now? Now we sit here surrounded by warmth and comfort and easily-available good alcohol, yet certain people insist upon reverting to the less-enlightened days of consumption?”
She allows the collar of the jacket to slip, reveling a bare shoulder, the tip of a gossamer wing. “But I divest 3;digress 3;
“Oh yes. Birthdays. Age. It's a funny word, age, isn't it? We use it for so many things. Wines age. People age. Cheeses age. For wine and cheese, this is supposed to be a good thing. We look for long years in our classic cars, but not our everyday transportation. We look for our expensive, hand-carved mirrors to be old, but not what we see in that mirror. We want our untouched books to look old, but our entertainment reading to be fresh and new. 'Old' and 'stale' are synonymous, but are not 'classic' and 'antique' and 'expensive' merely flip sides of that same coin?
“Age. The Golden Age of cinema, literature, poetry, painting. Whenever it was, the 'Golden Age' was the good one. The one to which we all remember and refer to with longing. But why the 'Golden Age'? Why not the 'Diamond Age' or the 'Platinum Age' or even, in this post-industrial, fossil-fuel desperate time, the 'Oil Age'?
“Nautilus, Hiroshima, the Manhatten Project ushered in the Nuclear Age. Such a strange project, that. One would think a team of mixologists were collaborating on the perfect drink. The perfect drink, of course is the vodka gimlet. Unimposing. Sweet, but with a bite. Refreshing. Grown up and mature. It says, 'I've moved past umbrellas and colored sugar on my glass rims. I'm comfortable in my adulthood not to need to prove to the strangers around me that I'm old enough to be sitting amongst them. And I am. Despite appearances.
Her fingers dance absently over the jacket buttons. Open, closed, she plays with the top, briefly flashing anyone who is still paying attention before speaking again.
“But I undre 3;er 3;digress.”
“Speaking of vodka, it's an odd drink, is it not? Held in esteem by both the elite and the working man. Sipped from fine cut-crystal in the velvet-padded drawing rooms, and swilled from jelly-jar glasses by the heartiest of Russian workingmen. Keeping them warm during the cold winter nights. In the glow of their meager fires, the drink of the people keeping them toasty. Or at least toasted.
“And speaking of toasts. I don this jacket to wish one of the more esteemed members of our little party a very happy Birthday. Mr. Urfé, we're proud of you for remembering to breathe. Happy Birthday.”
She steps, almost gracefully, from the chair and slips behind the curtain of the Taverna's stage. As the patrons resume their drinks and discussions, anyone still paying attention sees a bare arm, the sleeve of a Birthday Nymph suit, appear from behind the curtain to drop a jacket to the floor. A red jacket. Once beautiful, but now comfortable and well-worn, and only slightly scorched.
